by Ray Celestin
‘If you would ever like any introductions,’ he said, ‘please let me know.’
He passed her a business card. She took it and smiled. She slipped it into her purse, and wished him good day. He watched her slender figure cross the room and leave, and when she was gone he stared at the door she’d left through.
When Anastasia came later that day, he’d tell him the woman had confirmed Gabriel was dead. ‘A detective,’ Costello would say. ‘An out-of-towner with no reason to lie.’ He’d push again the angle about Anastasia being in full control of the racetrack and hope this time it might calm him down.
Then he wondered why he was still staring at the door.
He checked his watch. He had another fifty minutes before his meeting with Dr Hoffman. He was already dreading it. He lit a cigarette and as he inhaled, he felt something in his throat, and wondered if a new cold wasn’t coming on. He turned and stared out of the window at the park and the skyscrapers on its far side. Faron was out there somewhere.
When Costello had spoken to Genovese, Genovese had said he was cutting the man loose. Costello wasn’t sure if he believed him, but tipping him off about the airport had bought them more time. Costello had got the movie producers to vote the way he wanted them to. But Genovese had got his man free from the blackmailers and onto HUAC. Costello called it a draw. War had been averted. The golden days would continue. For a little longer, at least.
There was a knock on the door.
‘Yeah?’ he said.
He turned to see Adonis stepping into the room.
‘These just got couriered in from Vegas.’
He had an oversized envelope in his hand. He passed it over to Costello, who took a few sheets of paper out of the envelope, saw they were the latest accounts from the Flamingo. He leaned back in his seat. He ran his eye over them, absorbing the numbers. He flicked to the profit-and-loss statement. He did some sums, he read between the lines.
He looked up and saw Adonis had sat where the private detective had been earlier.
‘Well?’ Adonis asked.
‘The Flamingo.’
‘Everything all right?’
‘Sure,’ said Costello. ‘It turned a profit last month. Three hundred grand. They’re projecting more for this month.’
‘No shit,’ said Adonis, surprised. He took the papers off Costello, started going through them. ‘Who’d have thought?’ he muttered. ‘A casino in Vegas.’
Costello paused, thought about mad Benny Siegel, the missing two million. He still didn’t know which family Benny had conspired with to steal it, but at least he’d gotten it back, and now the Flamingo was turning a profit.
‘Who’d have thought,’ Costello repeated with a smile.
Adonis flicked a look at him, then got back to the papers.
Costello contemplated the new information, envisioned how it would cascade through the status quo, alter it, how the changes would fold into the future.
Maybe the golden days would last a lot longer.
He picked up the deck. He shuffled it, ordering the cards into chaos, into the unknowable void with which he’d do battle. He took a drag on his English Oval, felt a tickle in his throat. He was definitely coming down with a cold.
64
Friday 28th, 9.55 a.m.
Check-out was at eleven, but Louis was arriving to pick her up at ten – had insisted on giving her a ride – so she’d gotten ready early and caught the elevator down to the reception. She paid the bill. The concierge passed over her receipt.
‘Oh, I almost forgot,’ he said, ‘this arrived for you.’
He handed her over a letter. It was surprisingly stiff. A postcard inside the envelope. A goodbye card from Carrasco maybe. She went over to the windows that looked out onto 7th Avenue and waited for Louis.
In the days following the blizzard she and Carrasco had worked closely together. Arranging the interview, helping with the statement, going down to the court to see the case against Tom thrown out, visiting Michael to give him updates. Carrasco had been there when they’d had their Thanksgiving meal around Michael’s bedside, eating from paper plates on their laps, food Annette had prepared at the apartment and brought to the hospital in a hamper.
Annette had insisted Ida stay in New York at least until Thanksgiving. If she’d travelled back to Chicago, she would have just spent the day in her apartment, alone, so she didn’t need much persuading. Tom was there, his face still bruised and swollen but looking a whole lot better in himself, and that barrier between him and Michael she’d noticed in the visiting room at Rikers seemed to have dissolved, and that was as heart-warming for her to see as anything.
In her statements to the police Ida had made no mention of the Congressman or of Genovese. Neither had Cleveland. They kept it all tied to the murders at the hotel. To Faron alone. Hopefully, that had gotten back to Genovese, and Cleveland might live to see the new year. He’d given his evidence and had disappeared and she would always wonder where they’d taken him.
She’d kept an eye on the papers, and Helms’s and Genovese’s names had appeared nowhere in connection with the murders. All she’d seen was that Helms had made it onto the House Un-American Activities Committee, and she wondered if that wasn’t related to Genovese and Costello somehow. When she’d received the call from Costello asking to meet she’d assumed he wanted to put pressure on her to assist in the cover-up, but instead he just wanted to confirm that Gabriel had died. She had wanted to ask him about Faron, but it seemed Costello knew as little about his whereabouts as she did.
Perhaps she’d never find out what happened to him. The most savage killer she’d ever come across and she’d let him slip away. She thought back to the ice, to the stand-off, to Faron’s willingness to kill his own daughter. In the days since, she’d conjured up the various fates that could have befallen Faron. She’d imagined him crawling to some corner and dying of the cold, of blood loss. She’d imagined him making it to some apartment and fixing himself up, boarding a train out of New York. She’d imagined him living decades, murdering and raping ceaselessly till he, too, died, and some new form arose from the void to take his place. She imagined him immortal, a constant presence, the god of poverty, of injustice, always with us. She killed her thoughts, knowing the darkness to which they led.
A car horn blared and she peered through the windows to see Louis’ car double-parked outside. She nodded at the concierge, slipped the envelope into her pocket and exited.
She threw her suitcase onto the backseat, next to Louis’ attaché case, and got into the front. Louis pulled off into traffic.
‘Thanks for the ride,’ she said.
‘No problem.’
She smiled, lit a cigarette, opened the window a crack and a blast of cold air arrowed in. They headed downtown, talked and joked and Ida saw Louis had that energy back, the liveliness that had been absent when she’d seen him last. She’d followed the response in the press to Louis’ show. The ecstatic notices and reviews. In a single concert he’d reminded everyone why he was one of the greatest virtuosos in the business, had maybe got his career back on track.
‘Any more news on the band?’ she asked.
‘Oh, sure,’ he said. ‘A tour in California, to launch it.’
‘That’s great,’ she said, smiling.
‘There’re offers on the table from all over the country,’ he said. ‘But we’re going to start out west, so we can do some TV shows, too. We’ve come up with a name for the band – Louis Armstrong and The All Stars. You like it?’
‘Sure,’ she said. ‘The world needs stars.’
He grinned at her.
‘So I might be seeing you in LA when I’m over there?’ he asked, raising his eyebrows.
Ida stared at him blankly, then realized he was talking about her job offer.
‘You might,’ she said. ‘But I’m not taking the job.’
Louis looked at her and frowned.
She’d come to New York partly to see if she could m
ake it in a strange, new city. But that wasn’t what the trip had shown her, the important lesson she’d learned was that her office in Chicago could take care of itself. So she’d fly to LA, but not to work for the government.
‘I’m gonna let the office in Chicago run itself,’ she said. ‘And move on out to LA and start a second office. The Ida Young Detective Agency’s moving west.’
She grinned at Louis and he burst out laughing.
‘I knew you were going to laugh,’ she said. ‘What’s so funny?’
But he wouldn’t say; he just shook his head. She stared out of the window and watched the city slip past. Soon she’d be back in Chicago. She’d go home and make the arrangements and pack up the apartment, and as she did so, she’d finally read the letter left there for her by Nathan’s friend from the army, detailing how he’d died. And when she’d read it, she’d put everything in storage and move on out to LA, because even though she wouldn’t really stop fearing the future, she could at least sculpt her part in it.
They turned right at 112th Street, roared down Central Park West, through Columbus Circle, all the way to 42nd. Louis pulled up in the taxi rank outside Grand Central, causing a chorus of horns to rise up from the cabs.
‘You better hurry,’ said Louis. ‘Before they lynch us.’
She laughed. They hugged. She grabbed her suitcase and got out, and watched Louis’ car as it disappeared into the haze of Manhattan traffic and smog. Then she walked into Grand Central, down one of its great marble staircases. As she crossed the concourse she noticed once more how the movement of people around her mirrored that of the constellations painted on the ceiling above, of the gods gliding through the blue universe as one. This time it reassured her somehow, the thought of all that synchronized progress.
She reached the departure boards, scanned them for her train, found the platform from which it was leaving, then checked she had her ticket. She put her suitcase down, dipped her hand into her coat pocket and felt something strange. She took it out. Alongside the ticket was the envelope the concierge had given her earlier. She frowned. She ripped it open.
It wasn’t a goodbye card from Carrasco, but a postcard, with a hand-drawn sketch of a Mexican skeleton on it, smoking a cigar, playing guitar, wearing a sombrero hat, a garland of flowers around its neck. Ida turned the postcard over, and saw the writing scrawled on the back – To Ida Young, Enemy to those who make her one. Friend to those who have no friends.
She checked the postmark on the envelope.
Mexico.
She grinned. A glow spread through her, a mix of relief and joyful realization. She shook her head, and still grinning, slipped the postcard back into her pocket.
Then she headed for the platform where her train was waiting, and as she weaved her way through the gray crowds, she was warmed by the thought of California, the sparkling Pacific, the hopeful gleam of new horizons.
AFTERWORD
As with my previous novels, I’ve tried to make this book as factually accurate as possible, and failed. Mainly this failure consists of moving the dates of certain events from different months in 1947 into November, when the book is set. In a few other instances, I interpreted conflicting histories to suit the needs of the story, and at some points, I invented situations and scenes, but always within the realms of possibility, and always to fit the book’s themes. Below are some notes on the recognized history and where I’ve deviated from it; anything not mentioned here was either too minor to include, or is an oversight on my part, for which I apologize.
In many ways 1947 can be seen as the start of the post-war era, as it was in this year that much of what would come to define the second half of the twentieth century came into being. The CIA was set up, the Marshall Plan was drafted, the Cold War got under way, India gained its independence, and the newly formed United Nations first debated a plan to create Arab and Jewish states in Palestine. It was also the year in which Jackie Robinson broke the baseball colour line, and a mysterious flying object crashed to earth in Roswell, New Mexico.
In the cultural sphere, too, 1947 was a year of watersheds and landmarks; W. H. Auden wrote The Age of Anxiety, which gave the era a name; film noir reached its zenith; Jackson Pollock (a Louis Armstrong fan) started his first drip painting in January, and elsewhere in New York other abstract expressionists were helping make the city the centre of Western contemporary art.
That so much influential work happened in such a short space of time in one city is understandable given, first, the influx of refugees to New York over the preceding decade, and second, the state of the world’s other great cities after the war, and yet, it is still remarkable. While Pollock, de Kooning, Rothko and Kline were in the city helping to found the first truly American art movement, Dizzie Gillespie and Charlie Parker were codifying bebop on 52nd Street, Elia Kazan was founding the Actors Studio in Hell’s Kitchen, Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, et al. were forming the Beat Generation in dives uptown, the seed of the post-war counter-culture was germinating as dropouts and misfits gathered in Greenwich Village, and a half-forgotten jazz musician with his career on the wane played a concert that would turn his fortunes around.
This is the first of the events whose date I moved – Louis Armstrong’s famed concert at Town Hall happened on 17 May, some five and a half months before the start of the book. The sources are somewhat at odds about exactly how big of a turning point the actual concert was, though they all agree that the switch from a big band to the much smaller ensemble that became known as Louis Armstrong and The All Stars was a sea change for Armstrong’s career. In this book I’ve perhaps overstated the importance of the concert, but it’s a milestone nonetheless, and the switch the concert ushered in helped pave the way for Armstrong to become the pop-culture icon he is remembered as today.
Also moved from earlier in the year was Al Capone’s death – Armstrong’s old boss died in January. Another Mob death, that of Benjamin Siegel, is slightly off too. He was gunned down in June, but in the timeline of the book this happens a couple of months later in August. The Flamingo first turned a profit in May (not October, as in the book’s timeline). This was before Siegel was killed, making the reasons for his murder a little less straightforward – why kill him just when his casino was finally starting to take off? His murderers were never caught.
Despite Siegel’s death and the floundering start the Mob had in Las Vegas, the late forties and early fifties were the golden age of the American mafia, which at the time was headquartered in New York, its heyday intersecting with the city’s cultural flowering. The Mob’s level of influence at the time is best summed up in this quote from the book American Mafia by the historian Thomas A. Reppetto;
In the 1940s Costello would name the mayor of New York, Moretti would make the career of America’s most popular entertainer, Lansky would come to control a small nation, Siegel would found modern Las Vegas, and Lansky and Dalitz would help make it a fabulous success.
Much of this rise was down to Frank Costello. An excellent manager, negotiator and organizer, he led the Mob to its zenith, all while not actually wanting the job, and without feeling the need to employ bodyguards, cars or guns. Another large factor in this rise was the FBI, and its director, J. Edgar Hoover, who had gone on record as saying he didn’t believe there was such a thing as nationwide organized crime. Exactly why he held this view is a matter of debate. The end result, however, was that the one agency with the scope and resources to tackle the Mob turned its attention to fighting communism instead, and the Mob was allowed to flourish. In a modern parallel, after decades in a downward spiral, the Mob has experienced something of a resurgence since the 9/11 attacks of 2001, mainly due to the FBI turning its resources away from organized crime once more, this time to focus on terrorism.
Although Costello had wide-ranging influence, there is no evidence he directly interfered with the outcome of the meeting of movie producers in the Waldorf-Astoria; however, this behaviour is entirely in character – Cost
ello really did employ a telephony expert called Cheesebox to bug people, and he had a long history of influencing votes (most notably, he influenced the election of Roosevelt as the nominee for President at the Democratic National Convention in 1932). Costello had also stated he supported the fight against communism and the work of Senator McCarthy (the two men had met), and given his interests in the Mob-infiltrated unions in California, this is the most likely stance for him to have taken.
Likewise, the idea that Genovese tried to influence the meeting in the other direction is also my own invention, but again, it fits in with the years-long campaign Genovese waged to try and wrestle back control of the Mob from his former underling. Genovese did end up taking control of the Mob, and just as Costello and Luciano feared, his leadership saw the Mob lurch from disaster to disaster, and its power wane. The details of Genovese’s time in Italy under, first, Mussolini, and then the Allies, are all true, as are the details of his extradition and trial.
Costello really did visit a psychiatrist called Dr Hoffman, decades before Tony Soprano sought therapy, and, rather bizarrely, Dr Hoffman revealed both the identity of his famous client and the details of his psychological condition to the press. Whether it was through Dr Hoffman’s advice or not, Costello spent time socializing with New York’s artistic avant-garde.
The information about Ronald Reagan offering himself up as an informant to the FBI, and offering to turn over evidence about his friends, is based on FBI case files. (Case files which only became public after the San Francisco Chronicle fought a seventeen-year legal battle for their release.) Reagan’s links to the Mob-backed MCA is a matter of public record. When Robert Kennedy convened a Federal Grand Jury to investigate allegations of corruption and anti-trust at MCA in 1962 (one of many official investigations into the company), Reagan gave testimony to the jury, and lied, thereby committing a federal crime.
Joe Glaser, the manager of Louis Armstrong and Billie Holiday, had extensive connections to MCA and the Mob, and he typifies how the criminal underworld and the entertainment industry (jazz, in particular) were intertwined during the period. Whether or not he colluded in Billie Holiday’s imprisonment is a matter of debate.
